Should Your Website Be Responsive? Behind The Buzzword
Davis
Mashable.com, an online news site devoted to the tech world, chose 2013 as the Year of Responsive Design because 2012 marked an unusual 12 months. It was the first time since 2001 that PC sales were projected to be lower than they were in the previous year. And why are desktop sales on the decline? They can thank smartphones and tablets for that loss of market share.
Because more smartphones and tablets are on the market, it means more people are accessing websites with smaller screen sizes. And that, in turn, means websites need to be viewable on a variety of devices. Responsive design is a web development tool that enables websites to adjust seamlessly between devices, making viewing experiences nearly as good on a tiny iPhone screen as they are on a big, flat-screen monitor.
Behind The Buzzword
But the phrase "responsive design" may be a bit misleading. According to Erjon Metohu, founder and creative director of the web development firm Eri Design of Worcester, responsive design is less about design than it is about the framework of the site. What a responsive design framework allows a website to do is respond automatically to render the ideal layout based on the size of the screen with which a person is viewing a site.
If you have a smartphone, you've no doubt seen unresponsive design, like when you go to a website and have to zoom way in to read the text and scroll like crazy to find the right button to push. With a responsive framework, the website automatically knows what screen size you're using and customizes the site to fit that spec.
Metohu says he's seeing "a lot of demand recently" for responsive design because, without it, "it's so difficult to have a website that works on all the different devices and screen sizes."
By Design
One organization demanding responsive design is the nonprofit Old Sturbridge Village. The folks who help run the living history museum recently re-launched OSV's website using responsive design.
Kate Brandt, marketing and communications coordinator at OSV, said responsive design was a requirement as they planned their new site.
"It is something we had put in the RFP right away," she said.
For OSV, having a site that was easily accessible from multiple devices was driven in large part by its key demographic: moms. A busy mom wants to quickly look up OSV's hours on her phone when she's waiting in her car to pick up the kids from a half day at school. She doesn't want to wait for a page to load and zoom in to find when the place opens.
Another key driver was the fact that visitors to OSV now routinely use their phones as they walk around the grounds. Each historic site at OSV has a page on the website, so it was important that those pages load seamlessly on a desktop computer and on a smartphone or tablet.
Ryan Askew, a web developer at Northampton-based Gravity Switch, worked on the OSV site. He said he's working on a lot of responsive design websites nowadays, but he added that responsive design isn't always right for everyone.
"It does tend to take a longer time to implement and thus cost a little more," he said.
In order to decide whether responsive design is right for you, it's important to look at the traffic that's coming to your website. Free tools like Google Analytics can show you how many people are coming to your site via various devices. If, for example, 80 percent of your traffic comes from tablets, you'll design a much different site than if 80 percent of your traffic came from smartphones, Askew said.
"A lot of it depends on the budget and a lot depends on the content you're trying to share," he said.
Even if you don't want to go with responsive design, you'll likely want to have a mobile-friendly version of the site to cut down on load times and make it easier for people to find the information they're looking for. In this case, Askew said the mobile version of the site will likely offer visitors "a limited subset of information… The site may have 400 other pages that [visitors on smartphones] aren't ever going to see or read."
The downside to having a mobile version of the site is that you now have two places where you need to update information. Let's say your hours change. You'll need to update the desktop version of the site, as well as the mobile version. If you have responsive design, you would just make the update in one place.
And while it's easier to keep a responsive site up to date, there are drawbacks. Brandt acknowledged that there is some amount of compromise that comes with using responsive design. On the desktop version of the website, there are many large photos. But on a phone, "those just disappear," she said. "But we figured the information is what's most important (to browsers using a smartphone), so we were okay with that."
Plan For Success
Brandt did offer advice to anyone considering a responsive design. Her first tip? Decide whether you're going responsive right from the beginning. If you try to use responsive design halfway through the development process, you're probably going to see your deadline push out substantially. She also recommended selecting "a really good development partner that knows what they're doing and has experience with responsive design." She said she was shocked when the bids came back from their initial RFP because the prices were all over the map.
"Some developers may tell you that if you want it responsive it's going to quadruple the price," she said. "Don't listen to anybody that says it's going to cost four times as much." n
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